UN General Assembly: India will respond to pellet-gun claim

Pakistan used 2014 Gaza photo to support Kashmir human-rights allegation

After Pakistan’s permanent representative to the UN, Maleeha Lodhi, flashed a photograph on Sunday of an injured Gaza woman, alleging she had been shot with pellet guns in Kashmir, India on Monday will exercise its second right to reply at the United Nations General Assembly.

On Sunday, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj blasted Pakistan for its alleged support of terrorism, saying, “I would like today to tell Pakistan’s politicians… that perhaps the wisest thing they could do is to look within. India and Pakistan became free within hours of each other. Why is it that today India is a recognized IT superpower in the world, and Pakistan is recognized only as the pre-eminent export factory for terror?”

Exercising her right to reply, Lodhi raised a picture of a woman whose face was supposedly peppered with pellet-gun wounds, PTI reported. Lodhi claimed that the woman was a “victim of pellet-gun injury in Kashmir.”

However, the woman in the picture was not a Kashmiri. According to The Guardian, the woman in the picture was 17-year-old Rawya Abu Jom’a, a Palestinian who was injured in an airstrike in Gaza. The picture was taken by award-winning American photojournalist Heidi Levine in July 2014.